Speaker for the Diodes - July 13th, 2007

Jul. 13th, 2007

05:28 am - QotD

"I have a grown daughter that I raised with another woman. When
she was four, we left her one afternoon with my parents to go shopping.
My Baptist father usually slept afternoons away on the couch while my
far more progressive mother delighted in children. Upon our return, I
opened the door to hear our daughter saying 'Yeah, he only hangs out
with guys and wears a dress? Plus that long hair? Never got married? I
just figured it out one day: Jesus is a Radical Fairy.'

"My father was sitting bolt upright, his eyes bulging. My mother
was doing her best to keep from collapsing in hysterics. I rushed in to
hush my daughter, but my mother said 'Don't you dare.' She repeated to
my daughter, 'Radical Fairy?' And the child says 'Yeah, not like Bert
and Ernie. They're more like preppie gay guys.'"

08:25 pm - It Was An Afternoon, Now It's An Evening

Made it to pharmacy. Made it to nail salon after very annoying
wait for wrong bus due to misinformation. Stopped at Appalachian
Bluegrass for a nut blank because the slot for the bottom string
on the mandolin I was practicing on while waiting for buses crumbled.
(Blank is way bigger than I need; gonna have to cut it lengthwise.
Anybody local have a band saw and not mind the smell of bone dust
too badly?) Stopped at grocery on the way back. Am very tired.

Especially annoying numbers of rude, immature people out and
about today. Funny thing, when I hear people laughing and turn
around and see a cameraphone pointed at me (with such an exaggerated
gesture that it seems my seeing them is half the point), and I
bring an SLR to my eye pointed back at them, people freak
out. Dayum, either it's acceptable behaviour or it's not,
idjits; make up your minds! But suddenly I go from curiosity
to something-to-flee once the lens is aimed at them.

Have lined up rides for tomorrow. Tried to avoid pushing myself
so hard today that I'll be too beat to cope tomorrow, but with the
amount of walking required because of where the bus lines do and
don't go, and just being Out And Active fort so long, I'm pretty
darned beat. Hope I didn't push toooo hard. Gotta manage
to be functional Sunday as well!

Want ABC 2.0 <-> MusicXML converter. Found an ABC 1.6->
MusicXML tool, but a) it dropped three measures when I
tested it, b) it barfs on V: tags, and c) the source seems to have
been lost and the author is unreachable. Half a mind to start
banging one out in C (and wondering whether I could to the
MusicXML->ABC direction as a 'sed' script), but already have
Too Many Projects in the queue so should try a little longer to
find existing tool maintained by Somebody Not Me. Also want
shareware or o-s OMR (aka 'music OCR'); closest I've found is
30-day free evaluation of $190 program. Will try that, but will
try to time the start of the eval period to maximize usefulness.
(Probably worth $190, if I had the spare dough for that
sort of thing.

Have found annoying amounds of ABC FUD on chat boards while
Googling for tools, as well as an awful lot of "since I don't
need that, I can't imagine it's of use to anyone else on the
planet either; they should just all use the same proprietary
notation tool that I do" attitudes. Feh.

Doh! Should remember to ask about XML conversion on ABC
mailing list!

Tentative lead on Volvo wagon. More news ifwhen more news
exists.

Difference between now and the long-tiny-nested-paren
paragraph before, is today I realize I'm this tired.

Perrine is much more tolerant than I thought she'd be, of the
"cat-on-keyboard bad, so if you choose to occupy keyboard zone,
it's keyboard-on-cat" rule I've instituted. Though her acceptance
or disgusted departure depends somewhat on my typing speed.

I do wish she'd tell me where she hid the mouse I can smell
rotting. *sigh*